Left: Fernald’s cuckoo bumble bee (B. flavidus) female. Right: yellow bumble bee (B. fervidus) worker. Cooling the bees or observing from within vials helps us identify tricky species! Photos: C. Blair.
Finding these bees also serves as a reward for our hardworking field teams and I speak from firsthand experience! In the 2023 field season, our two field teams, operating out of Guelph and Sudbury, captured and identified a combined 59 bumble bees belonging to species that are either at-risk or are known to be rare. Of these, 43 were yellow-banded, which is unsurprising since we often pick sites where this species has been recorded, and 4 were American bumble bees (B. pensylvanicus) – a species also listed as ‘Special Concern’.
We also identified a handful of other bumble bees that, while not having a dire conservation status, are evidenced to be experiencing declines in Canada or are otherwise rare: 2 yellow bumble bees (B. fervidus), 1 frigid bumble bee (B. frigidus), 5 black and gold bumble bees (B. auricomus), 2 Fernald’s cuckoo bumble bees (B. flavidus), and 2 lemon cuckoo bumble bees (B. citrinus).
Finding these species requires thoughtful planning and a healthy dose of luck. Some of my favorite fieldwork experiences are surveying a new site for the first time and capturing one or more of these bumble bees. In 2022, for example, the Guelph team ventured into Toronto and surveyed at a local park complex, where black and gold bumble bees (B. auricomus) were first recorded in a WPC survey! We re-visited that same park in 2023 and were able to find them once again (this is the only site where we’ve found them). Needless to say, I am eager to go back in spring 2024 and find more!
